Slides for talk and draft paper on: Modelling Purposes

A talk at the 2017 ESSA SiLiCo Summer school in Wageningen.

Slides at: https://www.slideshare.net/BruceEdmonds/model-purpose-and-complexity

This discusses some different purposes for a simulation model and the consequences of this in terms of its development, checking and justification. It also looks at how complex one's model should be.

Connected to this is a draft of a paper:

Abstract
How one builds, checks, validates and interprets a model depends on its ‘purpose’. This is true even if the same model is used for different purposes, which means that a model built for one purpose but now used for another may need to be re-checked, re-validated and maybe even rebuilt in a different way. Here we review some of the different purposes for building a simulation model of complex social phenomena, focussing on five in particular: theoretical exposition, prediction, explanation, description and illustration. The chapter looks at some of the implications in terms of the ways in which the intended purpose might fail. In particular, it looks at the ways that a confusion of modelling purposes can fatally weaken modelling projects, whilst giving a false sense of their quality. This analysis motivates some of the ways in which these ‘dangers’ might be avoided or mitigated.

The citation is:

Edmonds, B. & Meyer, R. (2013) Simulating Social Complexity – a handbook. Springer. (Publisher's Page)

The text of this draft is at: http://cfpm.org/file_download/178/Five+Different+Modelling+Purposes.pdf

There is an updated version with 7 modelling purposes and different modelling *strategies* at: http://cfpm.org/file_download/186/Different+Modelling+Purposes-JASSS-v1.6.pdf